Analyst Insight: Many businesses have been paying more attention to the concept of software as a service (SaaS) and how it can be incorporated into their IT portfolios. The most commonly stated benefits -rapid deployment, lower cost, and scalability - must be balanced by other key decision criterion, such as fit, ROI, and risk.

Analyst Insight: Last year's economic pressures were among the most severe ever exerted on the modern supply chain. In response, many organizations are searching for ways to cut costs from their operations, either by reevaluating their IT infrastructure or by reengineering their business processes.

Analyst Insight: Some have said SOA is dead, killed off by overambitious zealots, underperforming products, and bloated service engagements. Perhaps the SOA of their dreams is dead, but the real SOA is very much alive. It just happens to look a lot like past software...only a bit faster, cheaper, and better.

Analyst Insight: No one could miss the continued consolidation of supply chain planning applications in the last few years. In spite of the more traditional player consolidations, new firms and new approaches have emerged that have caught buyers' eyes, from demand creation and merchandising planning to richer analytic engines to help fine-tune forecasting accuracy, as well as on-demand delivery platforms for these solutions.

Analyst Insight: SaaS and new enterprise software offerings have created a new dynamic for enterprise software selection as opposed to traditional software selection. The cloud evaluation process for software and services must consist of different and a more focused approach, including such factors as importance of methodology, model differentiation, industry-specific expertise and total cost of ownership.

Analyst Insight: Companies should evaluate how to fix select visibility and control problems in the supply chain without having to rip and replace the entire infrastructure. They should look at ways by which they can expand collaboration with trading partners without adding significant costs of on-boarding, training and maintaining these partners. SaaS and managed services are approaches by which these companies can increase the utilization of their existing software assets.